The plane that hit the South Tower
was not Flight 175

What to do?

20 March

Mrs bin and I were never very happy about using this still. It's small and not very sharp but it was the only shot we had of the plane that hit the South Tower taken from underneath. Even so, a rudimentary analysis seemed to indicate that the proportions were all wrong for a blunt-nosed 200 series, a major contradiction in the "cavemen did it" theory.

The still is a blowup from a video taken by ABC News. There is a certain amount of blur which, in my opinion, would imply it was recorded on analogue media (either film or video), e.g. it is not too clear where the nose actually begins, ditto for the engines. The shutter on a conventional film camera opens for a fraction of a second and records all it sees. If, as in this case, we have a fast moving object, the camera will record a blur.

Of course, the whole business is a subject for hot debate on many internet forums. Someone on Democratic Underground attempted to counter our site, and its many photos of strange objects attached on the plane's underbelly, with this photo from an Interim Report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST) (be warned this is an 8 MB pdf).

Now, far be it from me to find fault with the NIST, but I think they've been diddled. Sure, the bulge seems to be missing here, but the shadow between the wings doesn't seem convincing. (See bigger version of same photo here). It looks altered and has a slight reddish tint. And there's still the long pipe running down the fuselage.

However, that's not what interested me when I saw this. After our previous exercise we were on the lookout for a crisper picture and this was it. Better, these stills seem to have been taken on digital video. In contrast to analogue video, digital video takes sharp stills that are not dependent on how long a mechanical shutter stays open. You notice this when watching sports on TV. Instead of the motion blur from analogue producing a smooth movement on screen, digital video produces a series of jerky stills when an object, whether player or ball, moves quickly.

And casting my eye on the stills, the nose continues to look too long for a blunt-nosed Boeing 767-222 like plane N612UA.

Now, we don't have a still showing the whole plane, so we'll have to use our ingenuity. Take frame "f", showing the front of the plane, and frame "h", showing the back, and paste them next to one another in a Photoshop document. The graphic tools in Photoshop are not too great, so import the two stills into something like QuarkExpress (failing that, print the document and follow the steps but with a ruler and pencil).

Techie Notes:
Of course, doing a dimensional analysis like this is like walking into a minefield. A thousand people could repeat the process and you'd be lucky to get two sets of matching figures. "The World is Wide", says my friend Walter paraphrasing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. So to prevent any quibbling, the figures shown represent the lower limit values for the ratio A:B. In other words, we've been as generous as is reasonably possible in defining the distance B (the left-hand line barely touches the rear wing-tips, while the middle line has been set just past where the leading edge of the wing meets the fuselage) and strict in defining A (the right-hand line is set where the nose touches the building, though it clearly goes beyond this point). Nevertheless, this still gives us a value for A that is greater than B.

There may also be a difference in dimensions depending on how the images have been obtained. Though irrespective of the method employed you'll still get a value for the ratio A:B that is greater than 1.
To satisfy the perfinicky I'll describe how the images were processed:
The Scott Myers frames were obtained from the CatQueen JPEG. This is at 26 pixels/inch, so the resolution was raised to 72 pixels/inch for importing into QuarkExpress to give the quoted figures. When clipped and sent back into PhotoShop this gave a JPEG of 766 pixels width, this was reduced to 600 pixels in the above picture for the purposes of page layout.

Frame "f" doesn't include the whole wing assembly. So we can't yet draw the line joining the back ends of the wing tips. The plane is moving so fast and the time interval so small that we can safely assume that the fuselages in the two frames are parallel. Go to the picture on the left and join the back ends of the wing tips with a red line. QuarkExpress gives me an angle of 72.64º. Copy and paste onto the picture on the right (frame "f") three times for three parallel diagonal lines: once to give you the position for the backs of the wings, another where the leading edge of the wing meets the fuselage and another for the nose. (See Techie Notes on left.)

Sit back and take a good look at your work. You'll notice that distance "A" is longer than distance "B", whereas, in fact, it should be shorter for a Boeing 767-222. (This is more apparent when you draw the lines exactly along the defining points. Instead here we've used the Lower Limit Values throughout to counter the sceptics, see Techie Notes on left.)

"Rubbish", I can hear Mark say. Well, go back to QuarkExpress and check the measurements (or use a ruler and pencil). Click on the three lines and make sure that the "End Point" Y coordinates are all the same, realign if necessary. Note down the X coordinates for all three lines (though the fuselage does not follow the horizontal X axis it's the ratio between A and B that we want, so any straight line would do). This gives us X1 = 100.90 mm, X2 = 120.81 and X3 = 141.57, giving values of A = 20.76 mm and B = 19.91 mm. (Note that these are Lower Limit Values, see Techie Notes on left.)

Now compare with a scale plan of a Boeing 767-200 series...

As we saw in "The Wrong Plane", the nose section of a 200 series, A, is shorter than the wing assembly, B. Whereas for the 300 series A is longer that B.